The development and availability of personal computers and personal printers have brought with them repeated predictions that the paperless office is at hand. It is not yet so. Instead, the use of office bond paper continues to grow year after year. Even workplaces that minimize the generation of paper (i.e., printed) documents by use of e-mail, online and networked resources, etc., commonly receive large numbers of printed materials and documents. Rather than the paperless office, it appears that the foreseeable achievable accomplishment will be the management of printed documents.
The age-old solution has been to store printed documents in large repositories called files. In addition to large amounts of space, such repositories require manual indexing systems to keep the documents in order for retrieval, as well as staffing for physically placing documents in the files and retrieving them. As a consequence, conventional file storage systems for printed documents are relatively large and are surprisingly expensive to maintain when all costs are considered.
In response to the significant costs and requirements of maintaining conventional printed document files, computerized or digitized document storage systems have been developed. One of the simplest digital document storage systems is simply maintaining in electronic form documents that are originally generated in that form. For example, computer storage of word processing documents, e-mail communications, etc., simply maintains such documents in the electronic form in which they were created.
Of greater complexity are systems that convert printed or other written materials, generically referred to herein as printed documents, into a digitized form for storage on computer-readable media. Such systems characteristically employ optical scanners that form digitized images of the printed documents for storage in a computer storage medium, and software for creating indices or other identifying information for retrieving the digitized images at a later time. In most such systems, indexing information is manually entered by a user into a computer system. For example, the indexing information could include conventional file reference information of the type used for conventional paper files (e.g., file reference names or numbers).
This type of digitized document storage system may be a suitable substitute for paper document storage in many business contexts. Staff who might otherwise by physically storing and retrieving paper documents can provide the indexing information and potentially process greater numbers of digitized documents for storage. In addition, many such business contexts have existing document indexing formats that may be applied to the digitized storage.
However, such manual indexing might not be suitable in other business contexts, such as smaller businesses, or for individual users. For these users, the effort of manually indexing digitized documents for storage can pose a barrier to adoption of digitized document storage. For example, there often may not be suitable formal file format for indexing the digitized documents.